(Btw, I blame gmail for the mangled title ;-) -- it's been doing some weird stuff recently on Safari for me; but only in the subject line. I think there were backspace characters in an edit that weren't applied.) The permuted indices are interesting. It means really committing to the style/naming conventions, doesn't it? In common lisp, hyphen separated names and I guess camel-case for Haskell. Though you could split on underscores *or* camel case... I think multiple ways of indexing the data never hurts (except by confusing the user a bit). On that common lisp page I especially like how they've indented the words. Frankly I'd like a search box in any interface that displays more than two thingamajigs. That should be a UI commandment. I was expecting the objection of wasted server bandwidth for very large indices. I wasn't so worried about the client (even mobile) case. People can always press escape if a load takes too long. And it only happens if they manually drill down into "All". Perhaps a good idea would be to follow the convention used elsewhere http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ and have a link with a size warning -- "All Entries (1.6 MB HTML)." That should keep people from clicking on it with their smartphone :-). I can tweak it again to do that if people like. Cheers, -Ryan On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Thomas Schilling wrote:

For packages with many items in the index, these pages can get a bit huge. How about a permuted index like http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/X_Symbol.htm?

E.g., for your use case, you would go to E and then the row with all the "End" entries, which would contain all the names with "End" anywhere in their name.

I don't know if page size can be a problem, but at least for mobile or otherwise low-bandwidth devices this can be a nice alternative.

On 24 October 2010 04:41, Ryan Newton wrote:

...

When I encounter a split-index (A-Z) page it can be quite frustrating if I don't know the first letter of what I'm searching for. I want to use my browser find! For example, tonight I wanted to look at all the functions that END in "Window" in the Chart package -- no luck:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Chart/0.13.1/doc/html/doc-index....

...

Therefore I propose that even when generating the "A-Z" individual pages that there also be an "All" option for the single-page version. Attached is a patch against haddock's HEAD (darcs get http://code.haskell.org/haddock/ right?) that implements this behavior. As an example, here is FGL's documentation built with the patched haddock: http://people.csail.mit.edu/newton/fgl_example_doc/doc-index.html The great thing about hackage being centralized is that if people are happy with this fix it can be widely deployed where it counts, and quickly! Cheers, -Ryan P.S. At the other end of the spectrum, when considering a central index for all of hackage (as in the below ticket) maybe it would be necessary to have more than 26 pages, I.e. Aa-Am | An-Az or whatever. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/516#comment:6

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